Every brand who wants to stand out must become a media company. It’s the only chance you have to be discovered in such a noisy marketplace. That’s why it’s more important than ever for brands to become publishers.

It begins with you.

People buy people before they buy brands. Since people are more likely to encounter you online before they encounter you in person, your brand publishing strategy must create a brand promise that will create trust between you and the prospect. It is worth noting that you should be confident in your ability to transfer that brand promise “off the screen.” Not being able to do so could be fatal.

That doesn’t mean you need to be everywhere, but you need to be present in the places where the people you hope to engage are consistently present. Buyers are not going to shift their native consumption habits to meet your preferences. Make it easy for people to connect with you by producing channel-specific, brand-consistent content that takes advantage of the strengths of whatever channel you choose to use.

Once you decide the channel, you must create a publishing process that is equal to your ability to maintain it. If you set your expectations beyond your ability to deliver and integrate into your normal habits, you will become frustrated and quit. Further, your brand publishing opportunity will close quickly.

Content development is within reach when you create a system that establishes predictable habits.

Using a ghostwriter is certainly an option. Another option is to find a way to fit into the normal workflow of your senior leaders. It’s really a lot easier than you might think.

What’s holding you back from becoming a content machine who can leverage your platform and influence to drive your brand (and influence) forward?

Some people think all books are magical. They mistakenly believe all books possess some mystical reality that contains timeless truths to be pondered and consumed over long periods of silence.

There are books like that. It’s true. But that doesn’t mean every book has to be like that. In fact, most books aren’t.

Books are simply an ecosystem of ideas organized into a consumable format.

A leader represents an organization, cause, or brand. Both the leader and the organization he or she represents has a platform. That platform is built upon certain ideas that make you different, unique, and separate you from the crowd.

A book then allows you to capture the conversations you’re having with individuals and small groups of people in a variety of settings and contexts and put it together into a format that can be easily, quickly, and efficiently multiplied and distributed.

Leaders can’t lead without taking a stand.

Leaders cannot write something worth reading until they are willing to hold themselves accountable to the words they have written. Talk is cheap until you put the stand you have taken into a referenceable and transferable format. That is when your ideas become real.

Your book at that point becomes a plumb line by which you can measure your strategic decisions and others can manage their expectations about you and the organization you represent. This is what creating consistency and meaning for a brand is all about. (The professionals call this brand alignment.)

If there is anything magical about your book, it is this: Books hold leaders and brands accountable to the ideas they profess to be true.

The greatest disciplines a book can bring to a leader are organization and accountability: organization of core ideas about how you see the world and accountability to uphold and spread those ideas often enough and across a a variety of channels in order to move a broad base of people to action.

But accountability doesn’t have to be a negative word. It naturally reveals what others crave from leaders—authenticity. We want to know that the leaders we follow and the brands they represent see the world in the same way we do. It is the greatest opportunity we have to turn clients into fans, fans into advocates, and advocates into evangelists.

Accountability to our ideas isn’t something to shy away from. It’s precisely the way leaders and brands pull away from the pack and become truly remarkable.

You can’t afford not to publish a book.

But books are for artists and creative types, right? Not business leaders.

That’s where you’re wrong. In fact, it may be time to rethink the book entirely when it comes to its role in the life of a business leader.

Books are as valuable today to growing your business as your business card was in previous decades.

Books do something for you that other mediums of communication just can’t.

Books can…

Precede you as you plan and prepare for your meeting with that important prospect.

Follow you after your sales presentation is complete.

Separate you from the competition through effort, commitment, and dedication to a particular topic. (Perception is everything.)

Support you in your effort to garner the attention of traditional media outlets, event planners, and workshop organizers.

Grow you personally and professionally by forcing you to clarify your thoughts, intentions, and expected outcomes.

A book is a statement about who you are, what you want to accomplish, and how you can uniquely eliminate the obstacles faced by the people who need what you have.

Maybe it’s time you thought about a new kind of business card.

The chances are good that you know someone whose business has been impacted by publishing a book. It could be that a book is the “silver” bullet you need to stand out, get noticed, and gain the attention of the people who can transform your business and help you take it to the next level.

I’ve set up a weekly email that summarizes all my posts and places them automatically in your inbox.

You can visit the About page on my profile to find out more about me than you probably ever want to know.

A Case For Segmentation And Channel Management

One thing you need to know is that I’m posting on a variety of places around the web now more regularly than every before. Some of that is new opportunities; some of that is my continued curiosity about segmentation and channel management. But most important is that the engagement I get on these channels is higher than the engagement on my own site. (Isn’t that the point?)

Let me explain where I am posting and what you can expect when you find me there:

I post regularly on LinkedIn through their publishing platform. I tend to write about leadership and organizational issues there because it’s a more professional audience.

I post regularly on Pursuant’s site. I tend to write about content marketing, brand journalism, and publishing for nonprofits.

I am capturing my appetite for technology and how it can centralize and simplify your life in my latest blogging experiment, Chrome My Life. (This is mostly for fun!)

I post regular “visual blog posts” through my Slideshare feed because I believe images and words must co-exist in the digital world.

Of course, you can stay plugged into my publishing escapades through Amazon. This isn’t everything I publish, but it is most of what I can disclose publicly.

One Location, Many Outlets

To try to accomplish this all on one site would make me seem disorganized and inconsistent at best, and profoundly confused at worst. In an effort to follow what I preach to others, I have segmented the various threads of my messaging through channels and audiences that match their native consumption habits.

The beauty of Google+ is that I can provide one location to capture all this activity that is mobile-centric and still allows me to easily share and connect as well as update other social outposts (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, and—to a small degree—Facebook).

So there you have it. You can still find me across the interwebs but know that Google+ will be my “mission control” for now.

Most people have written off Google+. I’ve probably thought, tried, and attempted more around Google+ than just about anyone I know. It has intrigued me for some time now. I originally approached it as another social network, but my perception of its value has changed over the past year.

I’m ready to go “all in” for the next 30 days to see if my next attempt finally reaches a tipping point for readership and engagement.

Here’s why I think now is the right time for this experiment:

I’ve started publishing several places online. It would be nearly impossible for any one person to keep up with all of them, yet each stream is a dimension of who I am, what I think about, and how I put my ideas into action. My Google+ feed provides one place online to aggregate all my posts around the web.

I was able to create a unique RSS feed for my updates. Okay. I had to hack my way to get this, but it provides the core functionality often associated with a traditional blog. HERE is the feed.

I can deliver all my updates through a variety of social networks as well as in your inbox. It’s easy to SUBSCRIBE. Since most people still manage their lives through email, I thought it only made sense to ensure this was available there, too. But if your inbox isn’t available, you can still catch me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I’ll be using friendsplus.me to help me do this.

Each Google+ post is a web page. That means I’m laying tracks inside the most widely used search engine in history. Even if I don’t continue after 30 days, all will not be lost.

More people are discovering content through search engines than ever before. I’m interested to see how this changes what we think about “digital real estate.”

This is an experiment which means it could end up being a terrible waste of time and energy. Or it could end up leading to some new discoveries and insights.

Marketing is fundamentally about experimenting with a variety of elements to create a desired outcome. If we’re not experimenting as marketers, we are headed (quickly) toward irrelevance.

Are you confident that your nonprofit fully understands the difference between owned, paid, and earned media?

It’s possible that you’re leaving a lot on the table.

Learning how to leverage these three media strategies will:

Advance your organization.

Increase your engagement.

Invite more people to co-create and collaborate in the change you want to make in the world.

My lastest post on Pursuant’s blog will give you what you need to understand the what and why behind these three types of media. Included are 22 questions to help you and your tem evaluate where you are and how you can improve your efforts in these areas.

Get the information you need to inform your strategy and make better decisions.

In turn, you’ll accelerate your ability to connect with people who are looking for you and wanting to join your in your work.

If your nonprofit doesn’t feel a sense of urgency to adapt to mobile communications, then you’ll quickly find yourself completely ignored by the people who want to support you the most.

You don’t be ignored because you don’t have something good to say or that I don’t want to support you. You’ll be ignored because you’ll make it too difficult for me to engage with you using the device in my pocket.

I’m not suggesting that direct mail or long-form copy is dead. I’m not a doomsday communications prophet. I am, however, an advocate for the people on the receiving end of nonprofit communications.

If this is true, then doesn’t it make sense to adjust our nonprofit communications strategy to account for increased engagement via mobile devices?

The answer is yes.

But nonprofits have been slow to adapt, and I have an idea why. It’s easy to get lost in “production mode” and forget to look around and see how the world has changed. The irony is the nonprofit communicators who are the most resistant to mobile engagement for their organizations are also the ones who demand intuitive apps from the brands they engage with regularly.

Here are 5 recommendations for every nonprofit communicator:

Buy a smartphone AND a tablet. Use those devices personally and professionally for the next 30 days. Your insights will prove to be invaluable.

Don’t send any piece of digital communication out until you test it on a mobile device. What looks good on a laptop can be frustrating on a mobile device.

Make every digital message shareable. Stop thinking about mobile or digital channels as one dimensional. Take advantage of the unique characteristics of the platforms upon which you choose to publish.

Invest a growing percentage of your communications budget in mobile communications development and deployment. Keep your habits in line with the habits of the people you want to reach. No matter how much they like you, most supporters won’t channel shift on your behalf.

Stop making mobile giving painfully difficult and awkward. We’re all busy. If your email makes me want to give but your giving page is impossible to navigate, I’ll bail and will likely forget to return later when I’m in front of my laptop.

The most important shifts in nonprofit communications in the next 10 years will center around segmentation of delivery channels and optimization of mobile devices. This is already taking place. Just because you don’t “see it” [sic] doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Brand publishing honors the role of book publishing in storytelling but is released from the burden of selling books as a business model.

I was absolutely ecstatic when I discovered that Microsoft and Nokia commissioned a custom book to be created and published for Nokia employees after their acquisition by Microsoft.

Book publishing isn’t just for traditional book publishers anymore.

The book tells a much larger story about why the merger helps both companies become stronger and better positioned for epic success in the future. The Verge included a series of pictures from the book in its post.

This book provides a great example of how brands can and are using book publishing to create and share a metanarrative in a very efficient and effective way. A shared story can be a powerful vehicle to unite two disparate groups of people who find themselves working alongside each other in a new way.

Some books were never meant to make it to the bookshelf in your local bookstore.

How is your organization using brand publishing as a way to unite and focus your story across your staff, supporters, and donors?